Jessica Pratt – Quiet Signs review

There’s too much NOISE. Not just the babble and screech of what surrounds us outside the door, but even when we’re attempting to disconnect we’re assaulted constantly by demands on us, mostly the tug of stories of people we call friends but whom we’ve never met. And that’s before we’re drowned in a tsunami of news, opinions and general fakery which makes completeness an almost impossible dream.

Jessica Pratt’s third album is not only her best, it’s one of those records that leaps notions of genre and mode, demure without being timid and mystical without pretense, the Californian has produced a masterpiece that if applied correctly works as a filter against the outside so complete it should be prescribed by doctors.

Part of Quiet Signs appeal is in its simplicity – most often Pratt is accompanied by a faintly strummed guitar or whispering piano – but also in her voice, an other worldly purr that seems to have no edges. The neatest trick it performs though is in it’s invocations of the past, be it in the doomed pop of Karen Carpenter of that of her shattered heroine Marianne Faithful, a reverie that makes the listener pine for something they’ve never had.

An early contender for album of the year, Quiet Signs seems set to make Pratt the one thing she never wanted to be; the centre of attention, under a spotlight turned towards music that will make the world outside feel like a slipped dimension.

You can read the full review here.